What will happen to Xbox Game Pass after Phil Spencer retires?

Then the business reality set in.

Image: Microsoft

This is the way it always happens with subscription models: start with an enticing deal, then slowly ramp up the prices once subscribers are locked in. In early 2023, Microsoft ended its $1 introductory month. The price increases followed shortly after. For years, Xbox Game Pass cost $10 a month for its basic tier and $15 for its premium one. But in July 2024, Microsoft restructured Game Pass so it included five tiers, with confusing verbiage as to what was included in which. The biggest hit was that day-one Xbox Game Studios games — arguably the biggest selling point of Game Pass — would henceforth only be available at the priciest tier, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, which jumped to $20 a month. A year later, Microsoft hiked prices and restructured the service’s tiers again. Xbox Game Pass Ultimate now costs $30 a month. (The lower two tiers, Essential and Premium, are $10 and $15 respectively.)

Throughout the Game Pass era, Microsoft hasn’t exactly been transparent about the service’s subscriber base — or its profitability. Instead of outright saying each quarter or year how many people subscribed to Game Pass, Microsoft has doled out numbers either in smoke and mirrors or at convenient times. In 2021, Game Pass grew by 37%. (37% of what? Who knows!) In 2022, as Xbox aimed to sway the courts (of both public opinion and of regulators), Spencer revealed the service sported 25 million subscribers. The most recent public estimate, made by now-outgoing Xbox president Sarah Bond in a 2024 episode of the Official Xbox Podcast, pegged the figure at around 34 million. But it’s unclear how many members are subscribed at each tier. And the most recent price hikes spurred subscribers to publicly declare en masse they’d cancel subscriptions. (The web page used to cancel Game Pass subscriptions reportedly suffered outages shortly after Microsoft announced those price increases.)

Image: Xbox

All of this amounts to an unclear picture of how Game Pass measures up amid the Xbox business or the broader corporate structure. It’s surely not going away, not any time soon; even if numbers have flatlined or dropped since Bond’s 2024 estimate, that’s tens of millions of pissed-off fans. Is there a world where new Xbox boss Asha Sharma determines that new Xbox games won’t turn enough profit while releasing day-one on Game Pass? Maybe. The latest Call of Duty: Black Ops 7, meant to prove the worth of Xbox’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, didn’t exactly light up 2025 sales charts the way the series usually does (though many players did play the game via Game Pass). Then again, Game Pass itself accounts for a solid fifth of Xbox’s annual revenue, as revealed in court documents tied to the Activision acquisition. Removing the service’s biggest draw entirely only gives subscribers more reasons to cancel.

Polygon has reached out to Xbox and will update this story if we get a response, but at the end of the day, one thing’s for sure: Everything everywhere is getting more expensive, and Microsoft, like its competitors, has shown a willingness to raise prices, not just on Game Pass itself, but on Xbox consoles too. This is Econ 101, people. Once the prices go up, that is historically the direction they keep heading.